In my teens, as a fiddler and budding aficionado of Chinese culture, I avidly practised Fritz Kreisler’s Tambourin chinois (1901). He is quoted as saying

I don’t mind telling you that I enjoyed very much writing my Tambourin Chinois. The idea for it came to me after a visit to the Chinese theater in San Francisco—not that the music there suggested any theme, but it gave me the impulse to write a free fantasy in the Chinese manner.

Before the 1903 earthquake, San Francisco was the centre of thriving Chinese communities, based on the culture of migrants from the Pearl River Delta.

Kreisler performed the piece on his tour of China in 1923, evoked in the Naxos liner notes:

The most exciting time for Kreisler was the spring of 1923, when he made his first tour of the Far East. Having travelled via the west coast of America, he and [his wife] Harriet arrived in Yokohama on 20 April with the German accompanist Michael Raucheisen—who usually worked with him in mainland Europe. He then made his way to Shanghai for his first recital on the 28th, followed by another. Then it was back to Japan for eight concerts in the Imperial Theatre, Tokyo. Only at this stage did he find that he was expected to play solely sonatas: the library of every music-loving European had to be ransacked for the necessary music. “Kreisler had, of course, not prepared for such an unusual situation”, Raucheisen recalled. “Imagine, eight different programmes! And yet, one—I repeat, one—rehearsal sufficed, and Kreisler played the sonatas which he had not had on his repertoire for many years, by heart, without a single flaw in memory.” Needless to say he slipped in a few of his popular short pieces. The travellers survived quite a severe earthquake before leaving for engagements in Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya and Kyoto, followed by more in Yokohama and Tokyo. The tour took them to Seoul in Korea, then via Mukden in South Manchuria to Peking and Tientsin in China. In that country they at first played only for Europeans; but two days before they were due to leave Peking, Kreisler was invited to become the first European artist to perform for the Chinese intelligentsia in the Celestial City itself: he played an unaccompanied Bach work, which had to be repeated, then a Beethoven sonata and finally a group of short pieces. After two more concerts in Shanghai, the party set out for Japan, en route for the United States, only to be tossed about for twelve hours by a typhoon; but Kreisler was so full of enthusiastic impressions of his Oriental sojourn that his friend John McCormack undertook a similar tour in 1926. Having suffered the rough side of the elements in the Far East, Kreisler experienced the equally stormy effects of the terrible inflation in Germany in the latter part of 1923; and he and Harriet made themselves responsible for feeding between 600 and 800 poverty-stricken Berlin children every day.

You can explore various brilliant later versions, but here’s Kreisler himself playing it in 1928: 

I used to relish getting my fingers round all the funky pentatonic runs and double-stops in fifths and fourths—and the whimsical middle section is great too.

Much as I admire Kreisler and Co., don’t miss Sun Huang‘s exquisite erhu playing—and do click on the link to Saint-Saens and the toothbrush…

In those days, deprived as I was of “real” Chinese musical culture (as indeed were the Chinese, then—With All Due Respect to The Red Detachment of Women), chinoiserie was still attractive. It was to be a long time before I came across The Real Thing in rural China. OK, Tambourin chinois isn’t entirely similar to Li Manshan’s funky drumming in Yellow Dragon Thrice Transforms Its Body (coda to the Transferring Offerings ritual—my film, from 1.11.07), or the amazing tracks on the playlist in the sidebar. But I still like it…

For more on drumming in Yanggao ritual, see here; and for an instance of the importance of drumming in south Jiangsu Daoism, here. For more chinoiserie, click here and here.